Civ5

Does this game work out off the box for you? No! a stunning 47.33% of the responders answered! MP is nearly unplayable someone claimed! Are we talking about Civilization V? No! These are comments about Civ4!. Just after it's release the Civ IV Forums were flooded with complains and cries for help. Was Civilization IV a tragedy? Not at all. After a slow start many (if not most) considered Civ4 to be the best Civgame ever! Even one of the most skeptical Civ-Fans, yin26, in the end had to Eat the Civ4 box as he promised to do if Civ4 would live up to his high expectations!

How did Civ4 become such legendary iteration in the series after such a slow start? The answer is: Patching! And not only patching, also the expansions, Warlords in 2006 and Beyond the Sword in 2007, expanded the game into something great! What may that say about the Civ5 support in the future?

For those of you who also have love for Call to Power, I am attempting to bring many of the good aspects over to Civ 5 in my massive mod project.

I currently have the Alpha version on the modhub, which starts off the project by adding dozens of new techs, dozens of buildings, and a handful of late modern, early future units. You will also find massive changes to the balance of the game, which is the current focus of testing.

More details in the official thread and follow the Procylon Call to Power Project Blog

Greg '2K Greg' Laabs of 2K Games, publisher of Civilization V posted a list of 'upcoming changes' through a patch on the official 2K forums. "You guys have been asking for an update about what we're working on to improve the game, and today I am happy to give it to you." Greg says. It's important to take notice that "[t]his isn't necessarily the complete patch notes for the next patch, but it's what I have so far."

The Pitboss and Hotseat additions to the game are again confirmed, but not yet planned for this patch. There is no estimated time of arrival (ETA) for this patch yet. Greg also comments that they're looking into the issue where the Babylonian civ (DLC) is locked for multiplayer games, but a solution there is not to be expected for this patch. Some bugs are fixed but not listed, like the '70 cities crash'

The most important changes from Greg's list are:

• Added option to disable auto-unit cycling.
• Improved unit cycling logic. Camera will jump around much less.
• Rounded out financial information in the Economic Overview screen.
• Added detailed trade route info
• Added option to force workers to ignore manually made improvements
• Can now sell Buildings in a city
• Fix for Minuteman movement
• Research treaties that end because you declare war will no longer grant the free tech

Macrumors says that Civilization V may come to the Mac "Very soon"! "We've received reliable word that Civilization V for the Mac is due very soon -- likely in the coming weeks." Arnold Kim writes. All recent Civilization releases have been released to the Macintosh, but always about a year after it's original pc release. A release of Civ5 for the Macintosh within a couple of weeks would be a huge step forwards for mac and civ fans! "It seems the Mac is finally starting to achieve some improved parity with major gaming releases." macrumors concludes.

I´ve played a couple of MP Arena games now and would like to share some thoughts regarding possible settings from a "what´s fun", but also "what´s fair and interesting for a competetive game" perspective.

So far we´ve been playing mostly duels and a few ffa games (4-6 people, everyone for himself, not always war).

North_vs_South duel sized is a relative small map. The key factor though are its spawn points. Player seem to spawn relatively random - there is a "north vs south" aspect to the placement, but it can be anything from close to relatively far apart. Sometimes it´s tough to tell whether your opponent is south or north of you after only a couple of moves - so it´s possible that if you send your warrior away it could be going the "wrong" direction. Often though you start close the the northern or southern border of the map and can tell the general direction your opponent is in.

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Civilization V makes for a very odd testing scenario. There are no corridors to run down, and shooting the enemy doesn't result in anything more than two little characters poking at each other on a map. As a result, we had to break our testing down into two parts. To beat down the CPU, we actually timed how long it took for the game to complete the AI's turn. This was an amazingly taxing calculation on the CPU that was easily measurable in the tens of seconds and highly repeatable. Video card testing consisted of moving across the same map at the most zoomed-out setting, which dropped frame rates by more than half and proved to be quite consistent. Both tests were performed on a late-game scenario that had numerous computer AIs vying for superiority on a large map. Smaller maps with fewer AI opponents didn't stress the system nearly as much.

Civilization V has seen off a number of new releases to top the PC chart in its first week on sale.

Final Fantasy XIV and F1 2010 complete a top three made up of new games, ousting The Sims 3, which drops to fourth.

At the bottom of the chart, Command And Conquer 4 holds on to tenth place for a second week running, below The Sims 2, which drops one place to ninth.

Developer Dan Baker explained us how DirectX 11 enhances not only the visual appeal of the new strategy game Sid Meier's Civilization 5 but how its direct compute abilities contribute to the game's performance. Also he explains, how Civ 5 is a little further developed than PCs are.

DirectX 11 offers great performance increases, if developers know how to use the new APIs right. Firaxis, the developing team behind Sid Meier's Civilization 5 spent plenty of time finding out how to really improve gaming experience with tesselation and direct compute 5 in store. In an interview, Dan Baker - Firaxis Games' Graphis Lead - told us in detail, what they did with DirectX 11.

In Augustus Apolyton visited GamesCom, the biggest public Game Fair, in Cologne (Germany). There we had a first chance to play Civilization V hands on, but even more exciting for us was to Interview Jon Shafer (Lead Developer of Civilization 5) and get a demo from Peter Murray (Marketing Associate at Firaxis Games)

After the demo had finished we talked with Peter, and Tiffany Nagano, who assisted him during the demo, about Civ 5 (and a bit about Civilization Network, which is being produced by Tiffany). Apart from telling us very enthusiastically about Civilization V, Pete also listened to our questions, and promised us to answer questions from the community, if we would collect these and send them his way. We then collected all these questions and sent them his way. Today we got the answers, which you can read below.